Honor roll:National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen

• 2002 JT Black-Fiction winner
• 2001 NBA–Fiction winner
• 2003 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
• 2002 PEN-faulkner finalist
• 2002 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 2001 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• 2001 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 50.52

Enid Lambert is terribly, terribly anxious. Although she would never admit it to her neighbors or her three grown children, her husband, Alfred, is losing his grip on reality. Maybe it’s the medication that Alfred takes for his Parkinson’s disease, or maybe it’s his negative attitude, but he spends his days brooding in the basement and committing shadowy, unspeakable acts. More and more often, he doesn’t seem to understand a word Enid says.

Trouble is also brewing in the lives of Enid’s children. Her older son, Gary, a banker in Philadelphia, has turned cruel…

The March: A Novel

E.L. Doctorow

• 2006 PEN-faulkner winner
• 2005 NBCC–Fiction winner
• 2006 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 2005 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• 2005 NBA–Fiction finalist
• Score: 38.56

In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, demolishing cities, and accumulating a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the uprooted, the dispossessed, and the triumphant. Only a master novelist could so powerfully and…

Atonement: A Novel

Ian McEwan

• 2002 LATimes–Fiction winner
• 2002 NBCC–Fiction winner
• 2001 Booker shortlist
• 2001 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
• 2001 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
• Score: 38.52

On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching Cecilia is their housekeeper’s son Robbie Turner, a childhood friend who, along with Briony’s sister, has recently graduated from Cambridge.

By the end of that day the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had never before dared to approach and will have become victims of the younger girl’s scheming imagination. And Briony will have committed a dreadful crime, the guilt for which will color her entire life.

Atonement is Ian McEwan’s finest achievement. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, the novel is at its center a profound–and profoundly moving–exploration of shame and forgiveness and the difficulty of absolution.

White Teeth: A Novel

Zadie Smith

• 2000 JT Black-Fiction winner
• 2000 Whitbread-1st Novel winner
• 2000 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
• 2000 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• 2000 Orange shortlist
• Score: 38.5

On New Year’s morning, 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car on a London road and waits for the exhaust fumes to fill his Cavalier Musketeer station wagon. Archie—working-class, ordinary, a failed marriage under his belt—is calling it quits, the deciding factor being the flip of a 20-pence coin. When the owner of a nearby halal butcher shop (annoyed that Archie’s car is blocking his delivery area) comes out and bangs on the window, he gives Archie another chance at life and sets in motion this richly imagined, uproariously funny novel.

Epic and intimate,…

The Known World

Edward P. Jones

• 2005 IMPAC Dublin winner
• 2004 Pulitzer–fiction winner
• 2003 NBCC–Fiction winner
• 2003 NBA–Fiction finalist
• Score: 36.55

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor—William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia’s Manchester County. Under Robbins’s tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation—as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight of slavery begin to betray one…

The Stone Diaries

Carol Shields

• 1995 Pulitzer–fiction winner
• 1994 NBCC–Fiction winner
• 1993 Governor General's winner
• 1993 Booker shortlist
• Score: 36.45

The Stone Diaries is the story of one woman’s life; a truly sensuous novel that reflects and illuminates the unsettled decades of our century.

Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood and old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her own role, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her own story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon

• 2001 Pulitzer–fiction winner
• 2001 PEN-faulkner finalist
• 2001 Spectrum shortlist
• 2000 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• 2000 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 34.51

It is New York City in 1939. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat to date: smuggling himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague. He is looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn’s own Sammy Clay, is looking for a collaborator to create the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Out of their fantasies, fears, and dreams, Joe and Sammy weave the legend of that…

A Flag for Sunrise

Robert Stone

• 1982 LATimes–Fiction winner
• 1982 NBA–Fiction finalist
• 1982 PEN-faulkner finalist
• 1982 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 1981 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 34.32

An emotional, dramatic and philosophical novel about Americans drawn into a small Central American country on the brink of revolution.

The Inheritance of Loss: A Novel

Kiran Desai

• 2006 Booker winner
• 2006 NBCC–Fiction winner
• 2007 Orange shortlist
• 2006 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
• Score: 32.56

Kiran Desai’s first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published to unanimous acclaim in over twenty-two countries. Now Desai takes us to the northeastern Himalayas where a rising insurgency challenges the old way of life.

In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga lives an embittered old judge who wants to retire in peace when his orphaned granddaughter Sai arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s chatty cook watches over her, but his thoughts are mostly with his son, Biju, hopscotching from one New York restaurant job to…

Gilead: A Novel

Marilynne Robinson

• 2005 Pulitzer–fiction winner
• 2004 NBCC–Fiction winner
• 2005 PEN-faulkner finalist
• 2004 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• Score: 32.55

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civil War,” then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father—an ardent pacifist—and his grandfather, whose pistol and…